Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

My problem with this answer (VFB one, not the jokes http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif )is that if you read the unit description you can understand that there is a hidden bonus somewhere. After reading Mictlan priest description at least I think, well maybe they have a bonus. Some other descriptions point to those Maybes and as there is nowhere to find this information... It is like the assasin, heretic and similar icons, everything was on the description. So, why not on this too?

Redoing starshine question: has anyone done some tests?

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

There is a blood hunt bonus, according to Edi's database. The only unit that appears to have it is the Fountain of Blood.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

I noticed the same thing. I was really impressed with their ability to bloodhunt when compared to my Mictlan priests. I am thinking maybe blood hunters are affected by some of the same rules as patrollers.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

If it is that's the first I've heard of it. It seems more likely that those particular amazons have an intrinsic douse bonus. Those are possible to mod in after all, so they probably occur in the game for a handful of units (Blood fountain being one apparently).

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

According to Edi's DB, the Blood Fountain is the only one.

I know, it's because they are ladies! The villagers think oh, it's safe to show off our lovely virgins around her ... and then *surprise*! The WS chucks 'em all on the back of the lizard and off she goes.

Sorry enough silliness. More seriously, Karlem and Foodstamp, are you thinking you're seeing a bonus with the WS naked, or with a rod? It's pretty easy to set up a test.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

In my comparison both had rods. I played a game with LA Mictlan towards the end of the week, and played Sauromatia to test some of Baalz's strategy last night. Before I read Karlem's post I was already pretty annoyed that my amazons seemed to be better blood hunters.

Without exception, the blood hunters I had for Sauromatia were Nature 1/Blood 1 with dousing rods. For mictlan it was the standard 60 gold priest with dousing rods.

In the game with Sauromatia, one blood hunter would reel in a consistent catch of around 8ish. My Mictlan guys would have completely dry months, but could pull in as many as the low teens on other turns. This variance never happened one time in my Sauromatia game, which led me to think that maybe they were seeing the same variance, and then the amazon AP kicked in to save them from a dry catch.

Something else important to note is that I did not hunt in nearly as many provinces with the amazons and the game ended up being a lot shorter so they did not hunt as many times as my mictlan priests. That leaves plenty of room for chance, but it was noticeable enough that I think it would be worth testing.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

If I remember correctly, and I'm probably not (:D), another effect on Blood Hunting is the site frequency setting. I think this was done to balance gem production against blood hunting. I may be completely incorrect, but if that is acting like a scaling factor, this could be important. Of course, if this is EA Mictlan and Sauromatia, on base settings, then the setting would be the same.

I'm assuming population in all provinces was over 5k and the unrest was kept down. On the other hand, is it possible Luck Scale was having an effect? Or Magic Scale?

I'm willing, when I have the time, to set up a neutral test case for this and run with it.

Wyatt

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

Hmmmm, I remember when I wrote the bloodhunting guide I dug through the dom2 forums for the formulas and there was no mention of AP, luck, etc effecting it. Working from dusty memory but I think it was something like each of these is checked to see if the blood hunt fails, here's the percent chance of failure:

100 - blood level of hunter * 40
unrest/200
100 - population/5000

If blood slaves found, number of slaves captured is one open ended d6 roll plus blood level of hunter.

Obviously this may have changed (or not been correct in the first place), and it doesn't take into account blood hunting bonus for the blood fountain (no idea how that works). So, seems like when I ran the numbers 3 b1 mages with rods (b2 for the sake of blood hunting) in a 5k+ province with no unrest should average 16 slaves or so, with a lot of variation.

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

That was my understanding, roughly, of the formulae involved as well, but I seem to remember (or it may have just been a thought I had that would be cool and I convinced myself it had made it in the game) that, to balance spectacularly low site settings, blood hunting would be affected by the site setting parameter of the game.

Oh, well, I'll test that, too, at some point.

Wyatt

Re: Blood Hunting Bonuses
 

I'm 90% sure this topic came up before about magic site frequency altering blood hunting. KO said it was news to him and I think we concluded it wasn't the case.

The blood hunting douse bonus that the Blood fountain has adds levels to blood magic for the purpose of hunting only. I don't know hot big a bonus it is, but when you add the #douse bonus in modding, you can choose the strength. 1 is used in a few mods to make lvl1 blood guys who can hunt as if they were lvl2, lvl3 if they have the dousing rod. I would guess the bonus on the fountain is 1 or 2, but that's just a stab in the dark.